The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Augmented reality (AR) is a direct or indirect live view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are “augmented” by computer-generated perceptual information, ideally across multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory, and olfactory. Mobile AR technologies use a mobile phone's camera and its display to provide live view of the surrounding physical environment, which is then “augmented” by computer-generated elements (e.g., digital objects). A key component of mobile AR is monocular Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), which constructs and updates a map of an unknown environment while simultaneously keeping track of the camera pose.
Without additional knowledge of the scene geometry, monocular SLAM approach usually relies on structure-from-motion (SfM) to bootstrap camera tracking. SfM methods reconstruct an initial structure of the scene and recover camera pose at the same time. However, these reconstructions are up to an arbitrary scale. With the recent advancement of sensor fusion technology, Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) becomes mature enough for commercial use. Two most prominent examples are Apple's ARKit and Google's ARCore platforms. By fusing visual and inertial sensor information, metric scale of the environment can also be estimated. With accurate camera tracking and scale estimation, ARKit and ARCore allow seamless blending of digital objects and information with the physical environment. There are already a lot of mobile applications, such as e-commerce, gaming, education, etc., that leverage such capability. However, one important issue that has not been addressed by these systems is collision detection and avoidance.
Therefore, an unaddressed need exists in the art to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.